March 12, 2012
China’s push to overhaul its health-care system is encountering challenges from public hospitals, Health Minister Chen Zhu said, an obstacle that has broad implications for the country’s economic outlook. (Wall Street Journal)
March 12, 2012
The Obama administration is about to carry out a major provision of the new health care law by issuing standards for health insurance exchanges, the markets where consumers and small businesses will be able to buy coverage from competing private … Read More
March 12, 2012
Can we give ourselves super vision, super strength and super speed? Science fiction is littered with the theme of upgrading the human body with machinery. (BBC News)
March 12, 2012
A paralysed man who wants a doctor to be able to lawfully end his life can proceed with his “right-to-die” case, a High Court judge has ruled. (BBC News)
March 12, 2012
The parents of a four-year-old Oregon girl with Down syndrome were awarded $2.9 million after doctors misdiagnosed their daughter as not having the condition during a prenatal screening. (ABC News)
March 9, 2012
The failure of a daily pill to protect healthy African women against AIDS may not have been the pill’s fault but the women’s reluctance to take it, scientists at an important AIDS conference in Seattle were told this week. (NY … Read More
March 9, 2012
The White House has begun an aggressive campaign to use approaching Supreme Court arguments on the new health care law as a moment to build support for the measure seen as President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, hoping to shape public … Read More
March 9, 2012
The HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries, according to a new multicenter study presented Thursday at the 19th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. (ABC News)
March 9, 2012
Kenya’s government announced Thursday that it had fired 25,000 striking health workers from the country’s public hospitals for defying an order to return to work. (Washington Post)
March 8, 2012
In Silicon Valley, the line between computing and biology has begun to blur in a way that could have enormous consequences for human longevity. (NY Times)
March 8, 2012
It was not an unusual death. Kunj Desai, a young doctor in training at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, had seen many that were not so different and were equally needless. (NY Times)
March 8, 2012
Stem cells taken from the back of a human eye have restored some vision to blind rats, according to researchers. (BBC News)
March 8, 2012
An experimental technique seems to be freeing some kidney transplant patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs. (Washington Post)
March 8, 2012
A tumor’s genetic makeup can vary significantly even within the same tumor sample, researchers said, a finding that poses new challenges to the personalized-medicine movement in cancer. (Wall Street Journal)
March 7, 2012
Approximately 25 million individuals in the United States are affected by an estimated 7,000 rare genetic diseases. As these diseases affect relatively few people, studies researching them have been limited. (Medical News Today)
March 7, 2012
A new cornea may be the only way to prevent a patient going blind – but there is a shortage of donated corneas and the queue for transplantation is long. (Medical News Today)
March 7, 2012
A Beijing court has prosecuted more than a dozen people for organizing the illegal sale of 51 human kidneys worth about 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) in one of China’s biggest organ trafficking cases. (CNN)
March 7, 2012
New York is again debating expanding its DNA database, this time to include samples from every person convicted of a crime. The debate pits what backers say is solid science and more solved cases against critics who raise the possibility … Read More
March 6, 2012
The federal government’s only program aimed at preventing the discarding of “extra†frozen human embryos is itself in danger of being discarded. (Washington Times)
March 6, 2012
Morphine and similar powerful painkillers are sometimes prescribed to recent war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress along with physical pain, and the consequences can be tragic, a government study suggests. (Washington Post)
March 6, 2012
Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often, a study published on Monday concludes. (NY Times)
March 6, 2012
While China was becoming the world’s shop floor, India took its place as the world’s pharmacy, and in recent decades has been the largest provider of cheap, lifesaving medicines in poor countries across the globe. (NY Times)
March 6, 2012
Scientists at Nottingham University have developed an artificial womb to aid research into how early embryos develop. (The Engineer)
March 5, 2012
Debbie Lewis will never forget the day she had to tell her daughter, Emily, that the 12-year-old was going to die. (ABC News)
March 5, 2012
They are older patients with cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other serious chronic conditions. Many have multiple health problems, and their relatives might not be helping with their care. (American Medical News)
